The
Paris Pages Experience
Index 
Web Site / Database
Differences
The web site as database paradigm is a useful one. In general, as the amount of data in a web site grows, its content is best caste into one form or another of database. Without this updating of the web site content becomes an impossible task, to say nothing of hyperlink control which is eventually lost. Furthermore, the issues of data classification, data categories, and the management of these, as well as the very structure/arrangement of the data - and hence web site - are very much part of the database milieu.
Yet, web sites differ in at least one fundamental way from databases: Presentation. In addition to all of the usual database characteristics, web sites present and display data. Databases fundamentally do not. Certainly web sites can be so akin to databases that they are nothing more than a database search engine. Even then however, the presentation of the results of the database query, and how they are presented will require attention.
The solution to this problem is an area of active investigation by numerous groups. It is posed most strongly by the web search engines such as Lycos, Yahoo!, Web Crawler, among others.
Among those wondering how to present data includes those engaged in:
- Search Engines
- Data Mining
Approaches to displaying data includes:
- Clustering - allows for the display of a large collection of documents in an organized fashion, and for the identification of the underlying structures.
- AVANTI - dynamical / real time adaptive html creation (GMD Germany) adapted to user's navigation through the web site.
Closely related to the issue of presentation is the use of hyperlinks to associate diverse data types which we discuss below